The Tenth Cow
When Teddy Kagan finds a pure red heifer (heifer: a young, virgin cow) on the Florida ranch of a TV evangelist, he knows – because he knows Scripture and biblical prophesy – that he has discovered the first step in a plot to speed up the bloody End of Days and the Second Coming of Christ – a plot which could lead to a nuclear Holy War. And it’s Teddy’s job to stop it from happening. Fantasy? Not exactly. The plot is actually under way. “The Tenth Cow”, the third podcast novel by Aram Schefrin, takes the story to its limits, tracing what has already happened – and what could happen – through a brilliant cast of characters in Israel and America. Add polo, Kabbala, the American President and a strange love affair into the mix and you get a rich stew of romance, satire and suspense and a scary look at what might come to be the most important event of our time. To learn about the facts behind this book, go to www.tenthcow.blogspot.com and click on the links.
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April 12th, 2006 at 8:22 am
I find this story a little vague sometimes. I can;t find the word for it. It can be a little hard to follow and is not one of those stories you can sit back and relax in because one must really concentrate to keep up.
The characters need to be more defined. I mean that I find it difficult to know who is speaking sometimes.
April 20th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Not sure how the RSS works, but if you download the chapters individually be aware that your OS may alphabetize them so that TENTH_COW_EIGHTEEN comes before TENTH_COW_ONE etc. Change the alpha to numeric on download to get around this — TENTH_COW_01, TENTH_COW_18 etc. Otherwise you will have an extremely confusing story.
April 26th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
I recently added this to my aggregator, and am really enjoying the story so far. The world the author has created is one so completely alien to my experience I find myself reviewing the feed to make sure I don’t miss any plot elements. Mr. Shefrin does a great job of explaining to the reader the theology involved, but you need to listen to at least a few chapters for this information. Trust me, it comes together and is explained bit by bit, but in a meter that becomes familiar the further you get into the story. I especially enjoyed the description of the polo player getting coated in manure, “… like a chocolate-covered strawberry”. Great visual, that one. And I couldn’t stop laughing at the prayer scene with the Goys. Hysterical! I’m sure my co-workers were convinced that I’d taken leave of my senses. Again, another winner for Aram Shefrin. Please keep ‘em coming!
-George, Ft. Worth, Tx; http://www.thepublicdomainiac.com
May 22nd, 2006 at 8:26 am
There is an error in the podcast – the Ch. 26 download was the same audio file as Ch. 25
May 22nd, 2006 at 8:58 am
I’ve contacted the author, and have removed the offending file.
June 28th, 2006 at 7:19 am
Great ending, and I won’t spoil it for you here. Suffice it to say that I, too was worried about rapture occurring before Mr. Schefrin got out the last chapter, and not being around to enjoy it…. Thanks again for a GREAT book, and now I’ll head back to Consider the Elephant!
George, Fort Worth, Texas
July 2nd, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Really amazing story. Mr. Schefrin has an amazing knowledge of all things Israeli and Jewish. The details about the city and the history really drew me in. At times I did find the story a bit difficult to follow as there were so many characters and they were so intertwined. I just can’t say enough about the details in the book though. I feel like I learned so much about Israel after finishing this book.
July 22nd, 2006 at 6:58 pm
This book WAS hard to follow and I lost interest in it at times. I had to re-listen to it, so I could put together certain items. It was hard.
The reader sounded like he had taken a couple of Vicoden or took voice lessons from Sylvester the Cat. The music of Michael Jackson’s Thriller was kind of annoying. It needed a different introductory tune.
It really wasn’t my cup of tea, so my comments can be thrown out if you like. The story just didn’t flow fast enough for me.
I agree a lot with what Andre said.
May 15th, 2007 at 9:27 am
Episode number one at 22MB is empty -no sound (except for the ad about iFrogs). iTunes shows it is over two hours long, but upon playing, only the iFrogs ad plays and that’s it. Have tried downloading it twice.
Byron Int
August 5th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
I have to agree with Ramona Holliday: this book WAS REALLY hard to follow and I lost interest in it. I had to re-listen to it, and I gave up in the end…
Anyway, other listeners seem to like it a lot.
December 7th, 2009 at 1:53 am
What do you mean, hard to follow? In a world where Robert Jordans and G.R.R. Martins write multi-volume monsters with hundred subplots, this is trivially simple two-layer, single-narrative story. The only reason I can think of anyone having problems following is that in dialogs it is not always clear who is speaking. Other than that, I love the narrator.
The writing contains huge amounts of background exposition; unavoidable, and it was made into reasonable infotainment. Well done. The parts in Israel brought me vividly back to my years there; great sense of location, except for Tverya being put on Dead Sea.
Liked very much, except for the theme music.
A bit scary, but so it needs to be.
February 2nd, 2011 at 6:50 pm
I listened to the first 2 episodes and had to stop. The reader’s accent was killing me.
Please people…you might write a great story. But for God’s sake, get someone with a decent voice to read it for you.